A storage system typically comprises one or more storage devices into which information may be entered, and from which information may be obtained, as desired. The storage system includes a storage operating system that functionally organizes the system by, inter alia, invoking storage operations in support of a storage service implemented by the system. The storage system may be implemented in accordance with a variety of storage architectures including, but not limited to, a network-attached storage environment, a storage area network and a disk assembly directly attached to a client or host computer. The storage devices are typically disk drives organized as a disk array, managed according to a storage protocol, wherein the term “disk” commonly describes a self-contained rotating magnetic media storage device. The term disk in this context is synonymous with hard disk drive (HDD) or direct access storage device (DASD).
The foregoing storage systems are often equipped with a variety of compression algorithms for transparently compressing data when such data is written to a storage device. Storage savings vary from dataset to dataset. Thus, it is sometimes hard to estimate how much compressible data exists in a storage device before actually installing a compression-enabled operating system, etc. This may present challenges from a storage administrator's perspective, as it is important to understand how much compressible data exists in a storage device so that the administrator may effectively provision storage space.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.